Former state Sen. and state party Democratic Chairman T.J. Rooney says running against someone with medical issues is always a delicate balance for the opponent. “I know we had to run against then-Republican U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, who had had a series of health problems when he served the state in the Senate,” he said. “It’s incredibly tricky because the one thing you don’t want to do is come across as kind of cold, callous, uncaring. Anytime you raise a delicate issue, you walk a very, very fine line. As a candidate, you want to make your point, but you want to do so in a way that’s not offensive because at the end of the day, the vast overwhelming majority of Pennsylvanians have faced some sort of health maladies.”
Former Specter chief of staff David Urban said the difference between Specter and Fetterman is that Specter made all of his health problems public. “He never ran away from what he was going through with his diagnosis of an advanced form of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his triple bypass surgery, or his brain tumor back in 1996,” said Urban. “I remember that it was very important to him that he was very transparent about each of them.”
“The fact that Fetterman hasn’t made his doctors available, or anybody available, is pretty bad,” he added. “It flies in the face of the transparency that he has said was important to him since he first ran,” said Urban.
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